Sunday, January 15, 2017

Lots of Sydney gardeners will tell you that we don't really have four distinct seasons here. We kind of spend most of the year in a lovely, mild warm season, then it gets cold for half a dozen weeks in the middle of the year, and horribly hot and humid for another half-dozen weeks around this New Year time of year. In the same sense, we also don't really have one particular "peak" season, as cool climate gardeners tend to enjoy each spring. We enjoy several little peaks every year, and right now, in the middle of the horribly humid and hot time, when we're almost tropical in every way, well-watered Sydney gardens go berserk. Which is what our garden is doing now. So here's three "panorama" style wider-angled photos of midsummer madness in Sydney. Hopefully if you click on each photo, it will come up a lot lot bigger.

Using my iPhone's nifty "Panorama" function, this photo starts on the left with the rather ghostly looking sight of Spanish moss covering the bare branches of our recently carked-it ex-grevillea. On the left is a patch of cucumbers, chillies and assorted flowers. Big frangipani rear left, and on the right is a lemon tree, succulent patch, basil, Thai chilli, lots of geraniums and assorted others.

Taken from the other end of the path, this is the succulent patch, and beyond that are basil, shallots, geraniums behind, and mint bushes behind the geraniums.

The dominating, broad-leafed thing in the left foreground is the "Cute Cucumber" which has spread far and wide, and produces about four or five new cucumbers to harvest every day. The yellow flowers are hardy marigolds, the white and reds and New Guinea impatiens, and the blue is salvia. Herbs include chives, garlic chives, thyme and the lovely big lemon grass in the background.And so there you have it. A well-watered Sydney garden loving the heat. One handy tip right now for Aussie gardeners is to keep on watering pots well, especially on days when "a few showers" are forecast. Usually the showers do manage water the soil a bit, so you might not have to use the hose, but these light showers hardly do anything for potted plants, which can dry out amazingly fast in the summer heat. So I water my pots every day, unless it is truly pouring rain.

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

See the previous post — here. I made my first-ever batch of dill pickles. I've had to wait a few days, and today it passed the taste test very well.

However, I do tell a fib-ette (which is not a full-blown lie). I am not a huge fan of dill pickles. For something to qualify for an exalted "YUM" it probably needs to be made of potato, but that's another blog posting altogether. However, I can report that my dill pickles taste like real ones, and I intend to eat some more over the coming days and weeks.